Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
THE PRYCE OF FAME
Up for a first Oscar and back working with Terry Gilliam – but Jonathan Pryce says he’d rather have been a pop star...
Fo r a ma n wh o didn’t want to be an actor, Jonathan Pryce hasn’t done badly. He’s played every major role on stage, from Fagin to King Lear, while his film credits include an over-the-top Bond villain, the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise and the recent The Two Popes with fellow Welshman Sir Anthony Hopkins, which has earned them both Oscar nominations. Now his third collaboration with Terry Gilliam,
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, is out too.
‘My dream was to be a pop star,’ he tells me unexpectedly when we meet in Los Angeles. ‘I’d stand in front of the mirror with a hairbrush in my hand, using a tennis racket as a guitar, pretending to be Buddy Holly. Then when I realised that wasn’t going to work out, I became interested in art. At school I was only ever interested in painting and drawing.
‘I went to college to train as an art teacher and you had to do a subsidiary course so naturally, being lazy, I signed up for drama. I was in a play and a tutor said, “Have you ever thought of being an actor? You should go to RADA.” And it all fell into place.’
One of his first hit films was Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian sci-fi classic Brazil, and now he’s teamed up with his long-time friend again on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. A characteristically surreal tale about an advertising director named Grisoni and an elderly Spanish cobbler who believes he is Cervantes’ famed knight, it’s become a bit of a legend in film circles as it took a whopping 30 years to make after difficulties with financing and insurance, and an ever-revolving cast.
Terry stuck to his dream through thick and thin, and has now achieved his goal, with Adam Driver ass Grisoni and Jonathan as shoemaker Javier.
‘ Don Quixote is a more important figure in Terry’s life than mine,’ says Jonathan dryly. ‘Don Quixote is very Terry – he lives in his dreams, like Terry. I remember at the end of Brazil, my character had been so traumatised that he was going to live the rest of his life in his imagination. I thought that’d be an absolute nightmare, but Terry thought it’d be bliss!
‘I loved working with him again. All the energy and the images in the film very much come from Terry’s mind. It’s had a chequered history but when I finally signed on, Terry said, “I’d just been waiting for you to get old enough to play Quixote!”’ For a man aged 72 it was a demanding role, with stunts including a jousting match, an attack on a set of windmills, and a lot of horse riding. ‘They didn’t expect me to do everything I did,’ he says. ‘The stunt double was rreally annoyed because I did all my own riding. I left just one scene to him, where I fall off the horse.’ He was thrilled, too, to work with Anthony Hopkins on The Two Popes. The ere are parallels between them. Both grew up in working-class families – Jon nathan’s father was a former miner who ran a grocery store in Flintshire, North Wales, while Anthony’s a was a baker in Port Talbot, South Wales – and both went to grammar school where they were more interested in art than academia. Both began in theatre, Jonathan announcing himself with an acclaimed turn in Comedians in 1975, ten years after Anthony was spotted by Laurence Olivier and became his understudy at the National Theatre.
‘He’s an actor I’ve always admired,’ says Jonathan. ‘ I’d only worked with him briefly before, more than 25 years ago, but we look out for fellow countrymen.’
Now The Two Popes, a fictionalised encounter between the traditionalist Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony) and the forward-looking Cardinal Bergoglio, soon to be Pope Francis (Jonathan), has earned them both Oscar nods. ‘When we got to the set, for some reason my name was Number One on the call sheet, and his was Number Two and it rankled with him,’ smiles Jonathan. ‘He’d greet me at breakfast with, “Morning, Number One,” and I’d take pleasure in saying, “Morning, Number Two.” But he got his revenge when he sent me emails signed “Sir Number Two”!’
Jonathan has been with his wife, Irish actor Kate Fahy, since they met at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre in 1972. They have three grown-up children together and live quietly in London. ‘If you look for publicity, you’ll get it,’ he says. ‘I tend not to do that.’ He might not be able to avoid it after next week’s Oscars.
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is in cinemas now.